CHENNAI: Heralding the start of a digital revolution, the State is all set to lay optic fibre network along with BharatNet, covering 12,524 villages, 528 town panchayats, 121 cities and 15 corporations. It is learnt that last year, the State had sent in a proposal worth Rs 1,500 crore, which is now being revised to Rs 2,411 crore, and is sent for getting due approvals which would connect the rural areas of Tamil Nadu with the world.
The network, which is expected to be laid soon, is set to revolutionise the connectivity across the state.“The speed of the network will be one gigabyte per second (1GBPS), which is extraordinary. All the villages in the state will be covered,” said an IT official.
Under the project, the rural part of Tamil Nadu will be covered by BharatNet and the urban part by Tamil Nadu FibreNet corporation. “Once the project is implemented, it will ensure adequate bandwidth for the next 20 years. Now villagers who don’t have adequate bandwidth, will be able to browse the Net with high speed network,” said the official.
“The implementation of the network will result in providing e-services, e-commerce and e-knowledge to rural areas. It will not only bridge the digital divide but will also transform the entire rural areas of the State, providing them with a window to the world,” the official said.
Not only that, the network will link entire government offices of the state. “The end user of this network are the government ministries and departments, and the network will be used for various citizen centric services also,” the official said.
The network will be made available to the private sector also. Keeping in view the Government’s aim to provide affordable digital services in rural areas, the tariffs for utilising the optic fibre network are yet to be worked out, the IT official said. It is learnt Arasu Cable has tied up with BharatNet to use fibre network bandwidth for its subsided connections.